But Léon and Béatrice soon drifted apart. She was a good-natured woman but had few interests beyond her passion for riding. She became a member of the prestigious Monts et Vallons hunt as soon as women were admitted, and hoped that her life of horses and hunting would continue without interruption irrespective of the political situation. But in July 1941 the Germans had seized several cases of paintings from the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley, left there for safekeeping by Jewish collectors, including the Reinachs. In one of these crates was the famous Renoir portrait of Béatrice’s mother Irène, commissioned by Louise Cahen d’Anvers while she was married to the banker Louis-Rapha?l Cahen d’Anvers and at the same time the mistress of Charles Ephrussi.
But as far as the Camondos were concerned the Nazis wanted more than simply objects. When Renoir painted Irène Cahen d’Anvers in 1880 he turned her into a beautiful little French girl with golden curls who had left her Jewishness behind. One critic had written rapturously about the portrait at its first showing: ‘One cannot dream of anything prettier than this blonde child, whose hair unfolds like a sheath of silk bathed with shimmering reflections and whose blue eyes are full of na?ve surprise.’ But the same year Degas, who disapproved of what he saw as Renoir’s transformation into a Jewish society portraitist, wrote: ‘Monsieur Renoir, you have no integrity. It is unacceptable that you paint to order. I gather you now work for financiers, that you do the rounds with Charles Ephrussi. Next you’ll be exhibiting at the Mirliton with Bouguereau!’?
This tension in French society was never resolved and was now being played out with tragic consequences. Reinach, schooled in the long years of fighting for justice for Dreyfus, believing that rational protests worked and that the Germans would see reason, explained at length to the authorities how both the Reinach and Camondo families had enriched the French artistic patrimony. But when Jacques Jaujard, Director of the Musées Nationaux, doing his best to protect thousands of works of art during the Occupation, forwarded Reinach’s letter to Xavier Vallat, the one-eyed head of the CGQJ, the response was that the too-clever-by-half Reinach was arrogant. In any event, the Renoir had already been moved on through dealers, earmarked for G?ring’s collection in spite of its Jewish subject. Families like the Reinachs now urgently switched from worrying about saving their possessions to saving their lives. Reinach père soon moved to Pau with Bertrand while Béatrice, who lived with Fanny, continued for a little longer to ride daily in the Bois de Boulogne and to take part in horse shows and hunts, convinced that she was protected by her equestrian and German officer friends. More than that, the Camondos had given their son as well as one of the most beautiful homes in Paris to the French state, of which they believed they were a part.
It is impossible to quantify how many Parisians were poisoned by the anti-Jewish propaganda and how many were repulsed. But from now on the choice became starker: resist or collaborate. Yet although the majority of the French population entered neither active collaboration nor active resistance – the majority remained ‘attentiste’ (wait and see) until the end of the war – there is a notable shift at this point. The support for Pétain started to diminish from mid-1941 onwards and the support for de Gaulle and the résistance slowly grew from that time.